The LG Wing was one of the last (and weirdest) smartphones LG released before the company exited the smartphone space earlier this year. What looks at first glance like a normal smartphone with a 6.8 inch display is actually a dual-screen phone with a smaller 3.9 inch display that folds out to give the Wing a T-shaped design.
Theoretically this lets you view multiple apps at once or use the smaller portion as a controller. But now that the phone has been discontinued, one hacker has found another use for the smaller screen – rip out the smartphone’s guts and cram them behind the display to create a small standalone.
In a short video posted to Chinese site bilbibili, the hacker shows an LG Wing that’s been disassembled and repurposed to build a tiny-but-functional smartphone.
While the video is light on details, it looks like the hacker discovered that the smartphone’s mainboard and battery could both fit behind the smaller display if they were stacked on top of one another. The end result is a rather thick, but apparently functional phone.
The LG Wing’s original specs included a 6.8 inch 2460 x 1080 pixel plastic OLED primary display, that 3.9 inch, 1240 x 1080 pixel pOLED secondary display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G processor, 8GB of RAM, at least 128GB of storage, a 4,000 mAh battery, triple rear cameras, and a 32MP pop-up selfie camera and in-display fingerprint reader.
It’s unclear if all of those parts have been transplanted into the new Wingless mini, but at the end of the video you can see a brief demo showing that the touchscreen display is functional, the pop-up camera seems to have survived the surgery, and there’s even an LED light bar on top of the small-screen smartphone.
It’s unclear whether it can do things like, you know, connect to the internet or make phone calls, but if anyone who understands Chinese wants to watch the video and let us know if there are some details we might have missed, the comments are open.
via @MishaalRahman
This is the form factor I’ve been waiting for! Square-ish phone must come back!
I had a Blackberry Passport a few years back and it was both quirky and insanely useful. Viewing PDFs in particular didn’t require zooming and constant swiping left and right as I had to do on normal form factor phones. The keyboard was nearly as good as the older Blackberry models, and between the built in BB10 features and the support for most Android apps, it was a treat to use as a daily driver.
The ONLY reason I got rid of it was after a few months of pocketing, the steel frame had started bending to the point that it wouldn’t lay flat on a table anymore. I was wary of eventually cracking the screen and not being able to source a replacement for such an esoteric model, so I sold it on Swappa with full disclosure of the bendy-ness.
To this day it remains in my short list of phones I absolutely loved, right up there with the Treo 650, Nokia N900, and Nexus 5.
It’s Hip to be Square (all over again)! 🆗🆒✅🏆😊